Frank Bretschneider (DE)

Frank Bretschneider is a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. He is also one of
the co-founders of the prestigious label Raster-Noton. His work is known for precise
sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythm structures and its minimal, flowing
approach. Bretschneider's subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect
translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.

SUPER.TRIGGER comes again in Bretschneider’s signature style of ultra-clean bleeps
and bouncing machine beats with terseness and precision, and a preference for
high-voltage sounds halfway between noise and tone. The combination of programming,
composition and construction is connected with his very idiosyncratic aesthetic of digital
sound: controlled and objective. The whole follows simple mechanical states – on/off,
up/down, soft/hard, slow/fast, loud/quiet – and is characterized by the absence of any
romanticism. Still this return to the elementary, the fundamental, does not diminish the
music to dance-floor functionality. Instead Bretschneider always stays emphatically
musical and manages to generate sophisticated and complex rhythm-structures, which
respectively induce minimal deviations in frequency and timing relationships to
generate a surplus of funk.

Labels

Links

Panorama 3: Panorama Paranormal (63 min)
MUTEK
2012,
montreal

Cinéma Excentris 02/06/2012

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. His work is known for precise sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythm structures and its minimal, flowing approach. Described as "abstract analogue pointilism", "ambience for spaceports" or "hypnotic echochamber pulsebeat", Bretschneider's subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.

Resume of the piece:

Exp -

EXP is an attempt to assimilate the qualities of music, namely rhythm, movement, tempo, mood, intensity and compositional structure within the visual aspect. The music for the project is arranged from an array of generated and selected waveforms sourced from pure electricity, magnetism, light and other radiation. These sounds inform the visual animations, paralleling their changes in frequency, intensity and shape, attempting to exactly reproduce the audible occurrences.

NOCTURNE SAT 2

Society for Arts and Technology [SAT] 04/06/2004

A superior craftsman of sound, Frank Bretschneider is a prolific composer who, of course, records with Berlin label Raster-Noton, but who also wears different masks-each one reflecting special aspects of his creativity. With one of his recent projects, Aerial Riverseries, on the Whatness record label (headed by Ekkehard Ehlers) within the framework of a series initiated by a meeting between a musician and visual artist, Bretschneider aligns a complementary musical excursion with aerial photographs of a river in Iceland, captured by internationally reputed artist Olafur Eliasson. His last disc, on Taylor Deupree's New York label 12K, ventures off in a completely different direction: melody and finesse take a lead step over rhythms and syncopation. For his return to Montreal, the German composer will be displaying his most recent sonic opus, Gold-a delicate arrangement of sycophant sounds and windswept melodies tinged with a touch of pop, all in true Raster-Noton style. It will all be accompanied by videos conceived specifically by the artist himself.